Our old, stained newsroom is a tapestry of pain and peculiarity

There's a lot to leave behind when we move

Aug. 18, 2012

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You may have read in this newspaper or heard on the grapevine that The Journal News will soon be moving to a new headquarters on the other side of Westchester Avenue.

The new place will be modern, more in keeping with the digital age.

Please, no tears. Nobody will miss this dump — it’s pretty worn out. It admirably served its purpose.

Soon, the building will be torn down and replaced with a sprawling fitness center where paying customers will be spinning and cycling and working on their glutes, pecs and abs.

This is a radical change and kind of funny when you think about it. The first editors I worked for drank heavily and rarely moved from their desks. They hooted at the thought of exercise. I swear I could hear the arteries hardening inside one of them.

Anyway, this isn’t a requiem.

But I do find myself contemplating the old newsroom rug. Ancient, threadbare and encrusted with the grime of history, it is indelibly stained with accidental spillages of coffee, soda, soy sauce, yogurt goo, grease and Tupperware feasts of fettuccine and other fine pastas. There is sweat in it too, and possibly droplets of dried blood. That smelly old rug — if it could only talk.

It is a Bayeux Tapestry of journalistic triumph and pain.

Speaking of pain, I remember punching a wall in a fit of pique. That happened many years ago when I was the metro editor, a job that has the life span of a fruit fly.

My knuckle prints can still be seen in the wall. (I’m much better now.)

Much has changed over the years. When I arrived here, the newsroom was equipped with electric typewriters and a handful of primitive word processors called video display terminals.

They were terminal, all right. One brush with static electricity and phffft! A whole story would disappear, never to be retrieved. You never heard a more mournful wail than that which emanated from the poor soul whose 45-inch thumbsucker had just blipped off the screen.

Ah, memories. They are better off repressed.

A lot of crazy things happened here, but it is difficult to delve into the legendary events while also protecting the innocent. Indeed, I just deleted an exceptionally raunchy sentence after thinking about it for a minute.

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I wasn’t always so judicious. But I will tell you this. There was an editor here who installed a special lever behind his desk that, when pulled, would automatically slam the door to his office, sealing it like a sound-proof tomb. This could be unnerving to anyone who was summoned into his sanctum sanctorum for a chat.

The device was evidently removed long ago. I know because I just looked for it.

We have been asked to go through our stuff and throw most of it out before the big move. This is a challenge to many of us who could star in an episode of “Hoarders,” the reality TV show that features people who live under piles of detritus.

It’s amazing what has turned up. For instance, my longtime colleague Ken Valenti found a two-page relic from the 1980s that gave instructions on what to do in case of a phoned-in bomb threat. If you took the call, you were supposed to fill out a detailed checklist covering such things as the caller’s manner and tone of voice.

Under the category of background noises, you could choose from a variety of sounds. One of the choices was “bedlam.”

Dumpsters are rolling everywhere around this joint, but some things are hard to toss. There are heirlooms to carefully consider, like the 1997 softball trophy from the Harrison Recreation League when we had a first-place team (Division III) called the Bad News Bearers.

The trophy sits on my desk, its ultimate fate unknown.

My collection of campaign posters is pretty much up for grabs, too. Alan Hevesi, anyone?

Then there’s the old Reporter Dispatch’s “Civil Defense Test Edition” from 1955, which amounted to an incredibly weird but totally serious “what-if” story about a nuclear attack on the Silver Lake section of White Plains. The front-page “coverage” included a panoramic view of the city dominated by a superimposed mushroom cloud. According to one of the stories, the parkways were closed “to curb panic flight.”